Using the Macbook Pro Retina as a Sitecore developer machine

I didn’t buy my Macbook Pro Retina to do Sitecore work, so I was concerned the configuration would not be powerful enough. Luckily the 8GB the machine has seems to work well enough. The main bottleneck I find is the terrible Page Editor that takes ages to load without using any CPU. If anything, it seems like using an SSD is the single best thing you can do for Sitecore performance, since I notice little performance difference between Parallels and another Hyper-V machine I have with 8 CPUs and 16GB dedicated RAM also running off an SSD.

I didn’t want to go Bootcamp, so this is what I did:

Install new instance of Windows Server into Parallels (I used Windows Server 2012)